Trivia I find Ignored

Monthly Archives: January 2014

For the last six-ish months, I’ve been learning Arabic. It’s not one of those side projects, or extra credit kind of deal, we’re talking full time, 5 hours a day, 6 days a week. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve even started thinking in Arabic, however clumsily. My professors tell me that’s a milestone. I don’t know, still feels like a shitload I don’t have a clue about.

Since the first time I walked into a school, to the day of graduation, what I studied, what I learned, what I memorized has been predetermined. Anything and everything that I have associated with the word ‘study’ was what I was supposed to study. I learned what was laid out for me. From a syllabus I had no say over. I didn’t hate it, per se, I was good at it. Didn’t really have to struggle much, took it all in stride. Eventually, it did get kind of old. Don’t get me wrong though, I absolutely loved school. And college. But it didn’t even occur to me, until after graduation, that now I had a choice. An actual choice.

I could become an architect, an aeronautical engineer (I became one in a dream I had long time ago, so it sort of stuck in my mind), a doctor (well, not really, I didn’t go to pre-med) or anything in between. So when I did chose, learning a language, I mean, it was my choice, mine. And that more than anything else, made me want to learn, want to speak it more and more fluently, made me want to be so good at it, that I could be happy with myself.

Usually, I don’t really like to talk about myself, I’m more of a people pleaser, so I try to be funny, end up being sarcastic, because I don’t really know how to be funny. But this is an honest-to-goodness diary entry, that I had to write somewhere down, and since I didn’t really want to get a diary just for this, so there.

To all my old, old friends on wordpress, I hate apologizing over and over and over, but every time I write a post, it’s usually been such a long time since the last one that I feel like I have to, like I owe you guys. Even though you probably have forgotten my name by now, I haven’t.